What Do You Do With Weakness?

I read two articles recently about two very different Christian leaders. Both are high-profile men who speak to thousands of people daily yet they are so different in both their personal lives and their weaknesses. They both have learned to live with these weakness, one by covering it up and the other by confessing and leveraging it. They both are respected throughout the body of Christ and you would recognize their names. They are responsible for thousands of people in ministries as well as millions of dollars worth of assets. Now, I’m not so impressed with people who have such influence until I discover what’s going on behind the scenes and whether their ministry and personal lives are honest reflections of themselves as genuine followers of Christ.

In our day and age, marketing often seems to be the key to success, not genuine character. As a culture, we are bombarded with marketing tricks, even in Christianity.  What’s interesting today is that as we have advanced in our marketing techniques we have been outpaced by technological.  In the not too distant past, you could claim just about anything and get away with lying. Today, with the advancement of video and cell phones, many lies can be exposed in a matter of minutes.

Too often, as pastors and church leaders, we get jealous looking at someone else’s success.  We think “they” got all the breaks and we got all the struggles. As average Christians, we can also be jealous of other Christians who seem to breeze through life without a scratch while the rest of us struggle with our personal weaknesses. From my experience of living nearly 68 years, I have discovered that no one is exempt from some form of weakness in their life.  Some just learn to hide it better than others OR they learned to leverage their weakness.

I remember reading about the struggles of Lee Iacocca, the great automotive executive. Here is a man who brought Ford into the light with the development of the Ford mustang and the Pinto cars. After that success he was fired from Ford and went to work for Chrysler when the company was going bankrupt. He did extraordinary things for both companies and was renowned for his abilities to lead such large organizations. What I discovered was when he was young he was so sick that when WW II came along he couldn’t serve in the military. When I read about his life I discovered that the stress was so great he had two major ulcers and had his stomach stapled twice just to survive his complex job. The point is that greatness doesn’t come from luck or chance but from leveraging who you are.

Moses felt he could speak well and wanted to turn down God’s call on his life to the point that God got really mad at his stubbornness. Sometimes we reject God’s path for us purely because we feel flawed in some way.

Exodus 4:10-13                                                                                                                                                                                         

Moses said to the LORD, “O Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue. The LORD said to him, “Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the LORD? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.”But Moses said, “O Lord, please send someone else to do it.”

D. L. Moody, one of the greatest evangelists in America in the 1800s, had a rough go of things. Born into a family with 13 children, his father died when he was just four years old. He more than likely never made it past the 5th grade yet established a famous college in his name. In 1871, the great Chicago fire burnt his church to the ground and could have ended everything yet he then moved in to a world-wide ministry that changed the world.

Mother Teresa grew famous for humbly ministering to lepers, the homeless and the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta, India. She was proclaimed a saint by the Catholic Church in 2016. On her arrival in India, she began by working as a teacher, however, the widespread poverty of Calcutta made a deep impression on her and this led to her starting a new order called “The Missionaries of Charity”. The primary objective of this mission was to look after the people that nobody else was prepared to look after. Mother Teresa felt that serving others was a fundamental principle of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Rick Warren struggles with a handicap; he is allergic to adrenaline. When he gets ready to speak he gets blurred vision, extreme headaches and can pass out when adrenaline surges through his body. Yet, he and his wife Kay founded Saddleback Church when he was just 26 years old. They went door to door asking people what they didn’t like about church. His church today numbers in the thousands and he continues to serve as the senior pastor. In 1995, Rick’s best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Church, distilled many of the lessons he had learned while starting Saddleback Church and then honed during years of training other pastors. After sharing the “Saddleback Story”, the book makes a case for building a church around five purposes (worship, fellowship, discipleship, ministry, and evangelism) through what Warren called a “crowd to core” method of church growth. He encouraged churches to reach their community, bring in a crowd, turn attendees into members, develop those members to maturity, turn them into ministers, and send them out on a mission.

So, many of us have bought into the lie that our weakness disqualifies us from doing great things and yet the opposite is really true. I have been asked many times if I miss weekly preaching since retiring to Charlotte NC. To be honest, the answer is yes and no.  When I would walk on a stage to minister, whether in my home church or elsewhere, I always knew I was less than adequate to the task of speaking the word of God so that lives would be impacted. I knew and still know that unless the Holy Spirit shows up my words will have little to no impact. All I do is study hard and leave the power issue up to God.

The apostle Paul had the same problem as the rest of us. He had a weakness that drove him crazy and, being the man of God he was, he prayed earnestly for God to deliver him from that weakness.

1 Corinthians 2:3-5                                                                                                                                                                                         

I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.

2 Corinthians 12:7-10                                                                                                                                                                                   

To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”                                                      Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

Here is the deal – We are all “Flawed” in some way. If God doesn’t deliver you from your weakness…”Leverage” it for God’s glory!

Questions:

1) Have you identified and admitted your weakness to God? If not, do it today and then be free from hiding because of it.

2) Are you afraid people will discover your weakness? Admitting it to people will set you free from false expectations.

May the Holy Spirit set us free from the excuses of our frailty and use our lives to glorify Jesus!

Pastor Dale